According to Jack Wiley’s Complete Book of Unicycling Johnnie Severin of Atwater, California rode 100 miles in 1981 in 9:20:53. I’m sure Ken’s 100 mile ride around Lake Taupo (in 8hr 20min?) was faster than this.
Bill Loden of Booneville, Mississippi rode backwards for 14.8 miles in 40 minutes around 1983. I wonder if this record has been bettered yet?
Randy Barnes (any relation of George ??) leaped 11 feet 8 inches from a ramp on his uni in 1980! Amazing! He later jumped ramp to ramp over 10 feet 6 inches! These are pretty impressive distances! I wonder how much vertical height was lost in these jumps.
Whoa! 14.8 miles in 40 minutes would work out to 22.2 mph. Is that the correct time and distance for his ride? 22.2 mph backwards for 14.8 miles would be amazing.
14.8 miles in 1 hour 40 minutes would be more reasonable. That works out to 8.88 mph. Still a good pace, but could probably be bettered now on a Coker (but certainly not by me).
Not quite Tony, though if I was born 20 years earlier that may have been the case. The record is held by Takayuki Koike of Japan who set the 100mile record at 6hrs44min21.84 secs in 1987.
That will be extremely difficult to beat on a 100mile course like Lake Taupo, which is full of hills. I’d like to try and see how close I could get to it on a velodrome though, with 110mm cranks
My 45" Tom Miller big wheel, which I ordered in 1981 and received in 1982, was originally intended for tackling the previous record, of 10 hrs. 37 minutes by Cathy Fox of Marion, Ohio. As far as I know, this is still the female record. When I read about the 9:20 I was less inclined to go training for centuries, and never did.
There’s definitely an error in there somewhere. I’m sure Bill Loden was riding some kind of 24" wheel or similar. Bigger unicycles were very rare in '83. Peter Rosendahl and Steve Gordon have both gone over 40 miles backward.
These jumps were done on flat ground. Randy had some nice ramps, made of varnished plywood, with nice curves to toss him upward. He also had a “T” handle on the front of his Schwinn seat back in 1980! No relation to George Barnes that I’m aware of, though you can see him in a documentary that was done about the Ringling Bros. Clown College around 1983 (sorry, can’t remember the title). There’s this whole scene where Irvin Feld takes an interest in the details of Randy’s makeup and offers design suggestions.
There hasn’t been much interest in ramp jumping on flat ground since the Evil Knievel era. Randy had the biggest numbers I’m aware of, and the Redford and Pontiac Unicyclists used jump ramps in their shows. But I haven’t heard much about those things since then.
The Pontiac Unicyclists used to jump over rows of people, lying down in front of the ramp. Mr. Crandall, the guy who used to make the giraffes for $10 a foot, was always last in line. In the Redford club, we took a more “family” approach and jumped over foam bags that looked like a skinny rolled-up sleeping bag. We used to be able to clear 8 or 9 of them.
